Professional Training for Skills and Insight

Collaborative Professionals, Lawyers, and Mediators need strong skills to handle complex information, identify what matters most to our clients and help clients find creative, workable solutions to their conflicts. We also need to be able to manage the emotional and psychological impacts of the conflict. At the core is the need for insight into how conflict affects our clients and ourselves.

Jacinta is a dynamic, insightful trainer, delivering professional development programs in Collaborative Practice, Interest-based Negotiation, Mediation and Settlement Advocacy.

Jacinta offers customized training for groups looking to develop skills for their particular areas of practice. Please use the form below to enquire about customized training!

Introductory Courses

Interest Based Negotiation for Collaborative Professionals and Mediators

For lawyers, mediators, mental health professionals and financial specialists, who want to learn the foundation principles and skills to work with “interests” in negotiation. This course focuses on how to:

Frame the issues that need to be solved in a way that expands the possibilities for resolution

Help the parties move from positions to interests, and keep interests the focus of option generation

Develop good communication skills to move discussion from debate to dialogue, and handle strong emotion

Work with the parties and other professionals to create workable agreements that focus on the parties’ “interests”.

This 2-day (15-hour) interactive course combines presentation, role play and opportunities for reflection so that professionals leave with practical tools they can immediately put into practice. The content and approach meets the standard for training in interest-based skills required by most Collaborative Practice Groups.

Interest-based Mediation – Introduction to Skills and Process

To work effectively as a neutral professional in conflict resolution, you need skills and insight to manage conflict and a flexible, but structured process to move the parties from conflict to resolution. This 3-day (22.5 hour) course will teach you how to act in a neutral role to help clients identify and frame the issues, explore interests and create agreements that focus on their interests. We will delve into neutrality/bias issues, communication skills, process steps and the challenges of managing complex information and strong emotion.

Advanced Skills In Collaboration And Mediation

Keeping Interests at the Table

As experienced mediators and collaborative professionals, we know how to get underneath clients’ positions to identify their interests, but how often do those interests fall “off the table” when we begin to look at possible solutions?

This 2-day course is focused on how to keep the parties' interests "at the table" when working on potential solutions. Participants will learn to formulate a develop skills to help the parties develop multiple options for settlement, choose the best options and close the agreement.

Shifting from Judgement to Curiosity in Collaborative Practice

Collaborative professionals and mediators have to manage the substantive, procedural and psychological aspects of our clients’ separation. Our clients enter the conflict resolution process with feelings of hurt, anger and defensiveness. They often have a very narrow view of what is possible. Judgements and assumptions abound. Our job as collaborative professionals is to help them move through their hurt, anger and defensiveness and open themselves up to the many possibilities for the future.

Each member of the professional team brings tremendous knowledge and experience to the collaborative case. We need to be aware that we, just as much as our clients, are influenced by our own judgements and assumptions. In our professional roles, we are applauded for sound judgement and strong analytical skills. Clients ask us for advice, making it a challenge to deliver a client-centred process that focuses on the clients’ abilities to make their own decisions.

We need to shift from:

Judgement

Curiosity

Analysis

Exploration

Advice

Guidance

This 2-day course will help you build on your existing training and experience, and delve more deeply into how curiosity can help you be more authentic and effective in collaborative practice.

This course can be adapted for mediators.

That’s Not What I Meant! Feedback Skills For More Effective Teamwork

Effective feedback promotes understanding, helps maintain a common purpose, and fosters better working relationships. Collaborative teams cannot attain clarity and alignment without good feedback skills. Skillful feedback leads to a more efficient and satisfying process for all involved. Yet, most of us have not had the opportunity to learn and practice the specific components of good feedback.

The course and materials were developed in collaboration with Mark Weiss (Seattle Washington) for a presentation at the IACP Forum in 2015. It is most appropriate for professionals working in teams to resolve conflict and will focus on:

Key Points about Giving and Receiving Feedback

Checklist for Giving Feedback - a short tool you can use to help ensure that feedback you give will be most effective.

Matching Your Conflict Style to Giving or Receiving Feedback – to give insights about which style will be most appropriate for a particular situation.

This course begins with an examination of our strengths and challenges as legal professionals whose job is increasingly focused on settling cases. Topics include :

How to bring the law into a negotiation and keep a focus on what is most important to our clients

How to frame the issues to lead to more creative solutions

How to more effectively communicate with clients and "opposing" counsel

How to coach your client to be more effective in a negotiation

How to work with your client in mediation or collaborative practice

How these skills translate in litigation/arbitration cases

Presentations

Jacinta is a dynamic, engaging speaker on topics related to conflict and collaboration. She is able to deliver the message, with humour and wisdom, that bringing our own curiosity and authenticity to the probmen-solving experience has a strong and positive impact on our ability to help clients move from positions to interests to creative, collaborative solutions.

Jacinta is available to present at conferences, meetings and board rooms.

"Learn as a Firm" Presentations
Jacinta can customize a presentation to address the professional development needs of law firms who want to train "in house".

Testimonials

Jacinta has an engaging leadership and presentation persona. The topic was clearly defined and fit well in the time frame. This was my favorite course. I found it very informative and worthwhile. It changed how I expect to practice collaborative law and I can't wait to share what I learned with my local group. I was impressed with the presentation and would gladly take another with Jacinta in the
future.

Jacinta’s teaching on interests was an inspiration. She is warm and hilarious and (then you find) incredibly experienced, principled and wise. There is joyous de-bunking of some of that slightly self-righteous or regimented practice that it is so easy for us to acquire like calcium deposits as we do this work and instead, during her trainings, we get a clean sense of the professional we wanted to be when we started
out.

-James Pirrie, Family Law in Partnership, London, UK

Out of all of the presentations that I attended at the Forum, yours was by far my favorite. I was so excited to share with my fellow collaborative practitioners the concept of using the interest agenda to create solutions to meet our clients’ interests. I believe that this will also help “balance” certain power struggles we encounter during the process by ensuring that even the less vocal party’s interests are put forth and considered equally as those put forth by the more vocal individual. It forces the professionals to work with clients to identify what their real interests are, going much deeper than what the clients may initially put forth as more position-oriented
needs.

Interdisciplinary Team Training

Gaylene has over 20 years of CPA experience working in litigation support, forensic and business valuation. Gaylene is an international speaker and trainer for such audiences as the Wisconsin Judicial Conference, International Academy of Collaborative Professionals, Collaborative Family Law Council of Wisconsin, various European collaborative conferences, NBI tax seminars and other professional groups, presenting on tax, valuation and dispute resolution. She has extensive experience training interdisciplinary groups in the State of Wisconsin, Michigan, California, New Mexico, Illinois and Massachusetts. She has also provided training presentations in Vancouver, Toronto and Charlottetown PEI, as well as in Scotland and Italy on interdisciplinary dispute resolution.

Barbara is a licensed psychologist and certified family mediator in Maitland, Florida. She is a current board member of the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals and a founding board member of the Collaborative Family Law Group of Central Florida. She has been collaboratively trained since 2004 and trained as a neutral mental health professional since 2007. She is in private practice providing clinical and forensic psychological services including parenting coordination, family mediation, psychotherapy and psychological evaluation. She has presented at the local, state and national levels regarding Collaborative practice.

Jacinta is a Collaborative lawyer, mediator and trainer living in Charlottetown, Prince Edward island, Canada. Jacinta is an insightful and engaging trainer in the local, national and international Collaborative Practice community. She loves the challenge of working with skilled professionals who want to deepen their skills to be more natural and authentic in practice. With a great sense of humour, and lots of experience from “lessons learned”, Jacinta offers collaborative training that will help you transform your practice.

Introductory Workshops

Introduction to Interdisciplinary Collaborative Practice

In this interactive workshop focused on family law issues, lawyers, mental health professionals, and financial professionals will learn the foundational principles, processes, and skills required to work in collaborative practice. We will explain the role of each professional on the collaborative team, discuss the challenges and benefits of working collaboratively, and practice the skills needed to effectively engage with clients and professional team members.

This 2-day training (15 hours) meets the IACP standards for Introductory Interdisciplinary Collaborative Practice Training and is the foundation course required by most interdisciplinary practice groups.

Advanced Skills Workshops

Curiosity, Neutrality & The Money Gene

This interactive and dynamic workshop will be most valuable to advanced practitioners, as we offer our teaching from a “lessons learned” perspective! Professionals and clients in the collaborative process bring their own histories, perspectives and emotions about money. It is often the “money conversations” that are the most difficult – even when they can seem like simple math problems to experienced professionals.

This workshop helps participants better understand how emotions and perspectives tied to “money” subtly and not-so-subtly impact the collaborative process. Interactive, interdisciplinary case work is incorporated to give practitioners a real-time experience of working with team members of varying skill and experience. This workshop will help you maximize the positive impacts of neutrality and advocacy while helping clients move forward with difficult money conversations to find resolution.

Topics include:

Neutrality:

The role of the neutral(s) in the collaborative team

Understanding client perspectives on neutrality

Bringing balance and safety to difficult conversations

Money Styles:

Understanding and working with "money styles" and the "measuring gene"

How self-reflection and acknowledgement are vital to problem-solving the financial issues